DR. KING'S BEST FRIEND

By HENRY HAMPTON; Henry Hampton is the executive producer of the PBS television series ''Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years.''

Published: October 29, 1989

AND THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN An Autobiography. By Ralph David Abernathy. Illustrated. 638 pp. New York: Harper & Row.

The Rev. Ralph David Abernathy's career has always been both enhanced and obscured by the fact that he stood so close to the overwhelming presence of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As he reminds us in the introduction to his autobiography, ''And the Walls Came Tumbling Down,'' Mr. Abernathy ''was there from beginning to end, from the Montgomery bus boycott in the late autumn of 1955 to Memphis in the spring of 1968.''

Now the man who in 1957 helped to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (the most prominent clergy-led civil rights organization), and served as King's hand-picked successor as president of S.C.L.C. from 1968 to 1976, is at the center of a firestorm of his own creation, one that revolves around revelations not about himself but about his closest friend.

Mr. Abernathy and King were many things to each other - colleagues in the black church, cellmates, strategists, co-conspirators for justice - but at the personal level, they were best friends. But in friendships in which one person greatly outshines the other, a curious mixture of love, envy and competition can sometimes lead to a lingering, often unspoken resentment. Mr. Abernathy's reasons for providing a detailed description of his friend's last evening and early morning - during which King had sexual encounters with two women and a confrontation with a third close woman companion - can be known only to him. It is sadly ironic that the disclosures will almost surely do more damage to Mr. Abernathy himself than to the reputation of King. Mr. Abernathy's own story, that of a man at the core of a great social movement, will once again be overwhelmed by the world's fascination with Martin Luther King Jr. ''And the Walls Came Tumbling Down,'' however, is still worth reading. In it Mr. Abernathy reminds us just how young were the men and women in the mid-1950's who conceived and energized this remarkable protest movement (he was 29, for example, when the Montgomery bus boycott started in 1955; King was 26). Mr. Abernathy includes details about his early life and his family that help us understand why he had such strength. We learn that Mr. Abernathy's early years are spent on a 500-acre farm under the guidance of a strong father who protects his family from the ravages of the Great Depression and from most of Alabama's virulent racism. But it is still a world in which his father warns him ''never to play with white children.'' ''If you do,'' he says, ''every joke will be at your expense. If you wrestle or box with a white child, you will always have to let him win, otherwise he may become aggravated, and that could lead to trouble.'' It was Mr. Abernathy's upbringing that would eventually lead him to the ministry and to the fervent pursuit of an integrated society.

Mr. Abernathy's memories of service in the segregated Army in World War II provide insight into his pre-movement days. Consider this passage about his memories of members of his platoon: ''I still remember most of their names and faces after more than forty years; young and clear-eyed; afraid of the future, yet desperately seeking to shape it, to be a part of it; intimidated, yet cheerful, their voices in unison calling cadence across the years. When I recall these difficult times, I am always startled to realize how vivid they still seem, how much more alive we were during that period of severe adversity than in the docile years that preceded the war. By comparison, my childhood seems like a painted landscape in a museum, but my days as a soldier are carved in granite, a few incidents, some of them irrelevant, still standing in bold relief after the erosion of forty years.''

Colorful details bring alive the history of the civil rights era. Mr. Abernathy tells us the dangers of registering black voters in the Selma campaign were not always limited to helmeted troopers or violent sheriffs; one organizer barely escaped serious injury or death when he opened his mailbox to find a rattlesnake.

Mr. Abernathy was known as the ''other side'' of Martin King, and there is much evidence that King could not have succeeded without him. Mr. Abernathy was earthy and outgoing, connecting to the rural masses in a way that King, especially in the early years, could not. His ease with poor and working-class people, joined with King's intellectual appeal to the middle class, made the pair a powerful magnet for a community that needed to overcome class differences. Time after time during the movement we see Mr. Abernathy ''warming up'' the crowd for his friend, then leading the cheers.

Just as he did in the pulpit, Mr. Abernathy sprinkles his strong sense of humor throughout the book. He relates his offer of free lifetime membership in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to the racist Alabama sheriff Jim Clark; he talks about the time he one-ups a white Selma registrar by bodaciously reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to answer the challenge to ''repeat verbatim'' the 13th Amendment. It was part of Ralph Abernathy's fame that he ''preached to the doohickey'' - speaking directly to the ever-present audio bug placed in public movement meetings by Alabama authorities or covert agents.